A business often generates or receives documents for customers of the business. For example, a financial services institution often generates or receives loan documents, deposit account statements, investment account statements, insurance policies, home inventories, digital image files, video data files, etc. for its customers.
Typically, the business electronically stores a document in storage for an amount of time and then discards the document. After the amount of time expires, the business may discard the document from its storage for a number of reasons, such as to comply with a document retention (or destruction) policy, because of local, state, and/or federal regulations, or to save or recapture storage space. A customer may request access to the document from the business after the amount of time has expired. Because the amount of time has expired, however, the business has discarded the document and the document is unavailable to the customer.